The present invention is directed to semiconductor devices, and more particularly to stopping a write burst function in a semiconductor integrated circuit memory device, such as a low power double data rate (DDR) dynamic random access memory (DRAM) device.
In certain semiconductor memory devices, such as DRAM devices designed for lower power consumption applications, such as portable computing devices (laptops, PDAs, etc.), the length (amount of data) of a write burst is longer than commodity DRAMs designed for less restricted power applications. These types of write burst operations are also called full page bursts.
The host device may need to stop the write burst due to host device application requirements. For example, a host device application may need to urgently read out data and must interrupt an ongoing write burst to do so. An undesirable alternative to interrupting the write burst is to close the memory array with a precharge cycle.
Write burst interrupts are known in single data rate (SDR) DRAM devices, but not in memory devices that have an internal write latency, such as DDR DRAM devices.